PR469 IDE problem, was: Re: Any New 4.6.4 Issues

[Karel Gardas]

Thomas,

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Thomas Doerfler (nt) wrote:

> Chris,
>
> Chris Caudle schrieb:
>> On Friday 16 September 2005 03:30 am, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>
>>> A better and equally easy approach would be to write a configure script
>>
>>
>> I forget, can someone remind me again why the better approach isn't to fix the
>> IDE driver?
>
> well, hm, I have checked documentation (especially the ATA/ATAPI-6 Draft
> spec). Some mechanisms are described there to find out, whether there is
> only a master or only a slave is connected to a certain IDE controller,
> but there is no defined mechanism to find out properly, if NO device is
> attached to an IDE interface. The only method I can think of is to send
> a command to the non-existing unit and wait for a timeout. The first
> command to be sent to a IDE drive is a "diagnostic" command, and the
> typical timeout seems to be 30 seconds or so.

one thing makes me curious here. How all the linuxes and BSDs boot so 
quickly then on the standard PC with two IDEs and only one drive attached? 
I'm using such setup here and never seen linux nor any of BSD waiting for 
30 seconds on the non-existent drive. Maybe they know howto do it so maybe 
we can obtain this knowledge either from the source code or from direct 
question to the appropriate mailing list?

Anyway, I agree with you that any solution seems to be better than current 
state and thank you for your at least partial solution to this problem!

Thanks,
Karel
--
Karel Gardas                  kgardas at objectsecurity.com
ObjectSecurity Ltd.           http://www.objectsecurity.com